Cold Walking

This morning we walked the ancient trackway that runs along the coast to the northeast of Golspie and was once the main highway to Wick and the Orkney Islands, a walk we used to follow often when we lived at the other end of the village. Sadly, the weather was miserable, grey clouds which occasionally produced a thin, sleety rain, ice underfoot from last night's frost, a light but biting northerly wind, and....

....only the very occasional, very watery sunny interval.

There was little wildlife visible to cheer us. Even the gulls seemed to have moved elsewhere, and there was no sign of the rock doves which usually over-winter along this shore. However, we did see this patient grey heron....

....the usual cormorants, a curlew, a redshank, and a handful of oystercatchers.

The only thing perhaps worthy of attention was this plant, growing just above the storm line at the top of the beach, a plant we haven't seen before. Could it be a sedum, an escapee from a nearby garden?

Stanley's Kopje

I spend more and more time now looking back through the hundreds of photographs I have on my laptop, remembering people, landscapes, sounds, smells, animals.... remembering so much and, with those memories, wishing I could turn the clock back and visit the places I have loved, just one more time.

I know I won't, can't. If I could, I would go to places like Stanley's Kopje, seeing it as we did in 2011. It's a lodge in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania, typical of the sort we stayed in during our three trips to Tanzania. The large building houses the communal rooms - lounge, dining room, bar - while the guests each have a tent-based 'bedroom', all with wide views across the surrounding countryside. 

Makumi is the national park nearest to Dar-es-Salaam so isn't considered one of the best but we thoroughly enjoyed it. For those who must see the 'big five' it is a bit disappointing. We saw elephant and lion but the elephant were in small groups and lacked good tusks, a reflection of the years of poaching.

I'm far more interested in the less important animals, such as the Maasai giraffe which, like all the larger animals, spent much of their time in the shade, for Mikumi was very hot and dry when we visited; and....

....the zebra, which always look fat and healthy whatever the weather.

We enjoyed Stanley's Skopje for many reasons but an experience I particularly enjoyed was their early morning drive which included breakfast in the bush.

So, farewell Stanley's Kopje, Mikumi and its animals, including this rather fine marsh mongoose. I hope that, long into the future, others visit and enjoy you as much as I did.

An Unwelcome Visitor

This is the central business district of our small bird feeding operation, where fat, sunflower kernels, peanuts, niger, and mixed seeds are available to customers from a variety of dispensers - free - twenty-four hours a day, but yesterday afternoon it was suddenly deserted.

The cause is sitting to the left of the above picture, a....

....very smart sparrowhawk, visiting what it considered to be the centre of its feeding operation, and was in no hurry to move on.

The lack of small birds didn't seem to worry it. It sat for about twenty minutes, enjoying the sunshine and waiting for lunch to make a mistake,

None of the small birds did make a mistake so the sparrowhawk seemed suddenly to give up, and moved to another spot which is particularly popular with some of our small birds, the chaffinches and house sparrows - the bird bath. By this time....

....the very unwelcome visitor was being carefully watched, from a safe distance, so it moved....

....back to the feeding area, finally giving up and flying off round the side of the house.

The Day's Excitement

Winter does have a few 'up sides', one of which is being able to sit up in bed some mornings and watch the sun make a gory mess of the southeastern sky. Sadly, as soon as the sky had recovered from this extravagance, grey clouds rolled across and stayed over us all day.

We had just finished lunch when this bird flew by. It was some distance away, out over the Moray Firth, but I'm pretty sure it's a sea eagle as it ticks the following boxes:

            - wide wings;

            - wings with a slow, almost leisurely flap;

            - wedge-shaped tail;

             - some sign of white on the tail.

It's a welcome sight. I just wish it would come a little closer next time it flies along the Golspie shore.

Birds Along the Littleferry Shore

At about mid-tide, a small, dark spit extends out from the sands of the Littleferry beach. Beyond it lies the entrance to Loch Fleet. The spit's dark colour comes from it being composed of cobbles of stone, much covered by algae. It's a favourite haunt of waders....

....particularly turnstones, but when we were walking along the beach yesterday it was also playing host to....

....redshanks, ringed plovers and sanderling.

Not that they were going to be able to stay there for long as the tide, pushed on by a stiff wind, was....

....rising rapidly, causing rough conditions in the restricted mouth of the loch. Surprisingly, masses of eider were fighting the waves created by the incoming current. It was almost as if....

....they enjoyed the challenge, the excitement of it.

A Death & a Mystery

With a fine day forecast though with a slightly chill northerly blowing, we took ourselves for a long-overdue visit to Littleferry to stretch our legs along the sands - and immediately stumbled upon a small tragedy....

....a dead whooper swan lying just below the high-tide mark.

It looked as if the bird had died recently as the....

....local scavenger squad had only just started work on it.

A few steps further along the beach we came upon these tracks, three sets of them, all running up from the advancing tide line to just above last night's high-tide mark. At first I thought....

....they might be the tracks of a small otter but I now think it more likely that they were made by the whooper swan in its vain attempts to take off - perhaps to escape an attacker of some sort which kept chasing it into the sea.

A Daily Commute

As today's late afternoon light started to fail skein after skien of pink-footed geese flew over, calling as they passed, heading southwest for a night on their roosting grounds.

A not unreasonable estimate is that the top picture shows about 120 geese, and there were at least five similar, so a fair estimate is that these skeins contained some 600 geese. This seems a large number but a few years ago we used to see many more.

Then, tomorrow morning, they'll pass over in the opposite direction, to settle for a day's foraging on some unfortunate farmer's fields.

Snow Strawberries

At its deepest we had 5" of snow on the ground and temperatures dropping well below zero but that didn't prevent this plant from producing the UK's first snow strawberries.

The snow brought the birds in to the feeders in the back garden in unprecedented numbers. Chaffinches probably outnumbered all the other birds put together, followed by house sparrows, blackbirds, coal, great and blue tits, goldfinches, dunnocks, wood pigeons, a rook and a single siskin. At one point I counted thirty-five birds enjoying our hospitality; and this afternoon took delivery of 25kg of sunflower kernels. That should keep them going for a week or two!

In yesterday's late afternoon, with the temperature dropping, the house sparrows decided it was a good time....

....to take a bath.

Meanwhile, in the front garden....

....where water is provided in an old frying pan, the chaffinches, along with a few goldfinches and a greenfinch, were cleaning up the sunflower seeds dropped from three feeders by goldfinches and coal tits.

By the end of today most of the snow had thawed. It may be beautiful when it first falls but, for those of us who aren't as nimble on our pins as we used to be, it really hasn't been much fun.

The Snow Turns Nasty

For the last two days, despite a total of over 4" of relatively fresh snow on the ground, we've been able to enjoy it while still feeling that conditions were safe enough underfoot for us to walk down to the village to buy a paper and a few essentials. However, last night's -3C temperatures, on top of a thaw yesterday afternoon, turned the going lethal so we took a short, careful walk this morning up one of the estate tracks, passing....

....the local farmer's cattle which enjoy an enviable view from their dining room.

It was once again very noticeable that, as we approached the houses on our way home....

....more and more small birds started to appear, including some, like the blackbirds, which we haven't seen in any numbers since the end of the nesting season, and others....

....like the siskins, which we haven't seen at all since the summer.

This has been an early, and not very pleasant reminder of winter, so we're quite pleased to see that the forecast is for a return to more normal weather.

Nostalgia

Brittanica defines nostalgia as 'an affectionate and often sentimental feeling experienced when remembering past times, places, and experiences, especially those with happy personal associations,' and adds that, 'The feeling may also connote a desire to return to past times and places or wishing that they could be experienced again. Feelings of nostalgia are often triggered when people encounter a familiar smell or sound, when they speak to others, or when they feel lonely.'

As someone who, in their increasing years, suffers considerably from nostalgia I broadly agree with this definition except I would argue that, when I get an attack of nostalgia, it hurts - it is neither 'affectionate' nor 'sentimental'. My feelings are perhaps better reflected in the original definition of the word, when it was coined in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. He blended the Greek words nostos (“return” or “homecoming”) and algos (“pain”).

Britannica continues, 'Hofer described the feeling as a “cerebral disease” that afflicts young soldiers, students, and domestic servants who are sent abroad and become consumed by a desire to return to their homeland.' As a 'disease' which causes pain it's definitely not good for you, and a professional would probably urge one not to indulge in it.

Yet I do. I find myself transported back to a place, to a time, to a world in which I was happy - such as the beaches of East Africa. I'm very good at forgetting the down-sides of life at that time, and at excluding any thoughts of how people and the places of my happiness will have changed, never for the better.

First Snow

Winter's first snow arrived yesterday evening, furtively, so it gave me a surprise when I went out of the front door just after ten to see if any of the Leonid meteorites were visible which, obviously, they weren't.

By morning the snow was much more serious, with an inch already settled and more arriving, often in big flakes, though....

....the occasional break in the cloud allowed us to watch the sunrise over the snowy rooftops.

As always, the birds are having a hard time of it, any scattered seed being quickly covered by further flurries of snow.

To our surprise, just before we set out for the shops a gritter came along our road, probably because....

....they had been working all night so roads like the A9 were clear.

By midday we had snow to two inches depth in the places where it wasn't thawing and the prospect of more throughout the rest of today and into tomorrow.

First Winter Showers

The recent morning skies have given us warning enough of bad weather to come - this is Sunday's display - so I had no cause to be surprised when, minutes after leaving the house today to....

....walk up into the forestry, I was hit by the first 'snail' shower of the 2025/26 winter - that is, a mixture of snow and hail brought down on a northerly wind.

As always, I had a purpose to my walk. It was to follow up on a walk we took on Sunday when we noticed, in the middle of a pine plantation, that not a single bird was singing. Normally, we would have expected to hear blue and coal tits, chaffinches, a blackbird or two, but.... nothing, not until our walk was nearly at an end, when I spotted a lone goldcrest, sadly not for long enough for a photo.

Nor was it any different today. Other than a buzzard flying high above, the only evidence of bird life was this sad little pile of feathers, perhaps the work of a sparrowhawk.

It's not until one approaches the houses that birds become evident, drawn by the food people are putting out for them, but it's a sad world if, increasingly, our small creatures have to rely on us to survive.